Destruction of Defenders: Soviet Terror in the Soviet Armed Forces

Stalin's repressions in the RKKA (Workers-Peasant Red Army) began in the early 1930s and went in waves. The mass destruction of skilled personnel - military teachers and officers - could have cost huge escapes in the war against Nazi Germany. Russian historian Alexander Daniel talks about Soviet terror in the ranks of the armed forces of the Soviet Union. Speaking of Stalin's repressions in the RKKA (Workers-Peasant Red Army), it is customary to recall first of all the so-called "Tukhachevsky case" of 1937 and the subsequent large-scale purge of the army command. However, repressions in the army began much earlier. 

The first five marshals of the Soviet Union (left to right) sit: Tukhachevsky (shot), Voroshilov, Yegorov (shot); Reporter: Budonny and Blucher (arrested, died in Lefortovo prison from torture).

The first and so far the main reason for the special attention of the state security agencies to the command staff of the Red Army was the "social origin" of many military specialists, especially the higher staff and teaching staff of the higher and middle military schools. The widespread notion that the RCCA cadres were "flesh from the flesh of workers and peasants" is, to say the least, one-sided. During the Civil War, from half (in 1919) to a third (in 1921) of the RCMP commanding staff were former officers of the Russian Imperial Army, who volunteered or mobilized to serve with the Reds. This, however, did not reduce the suspicion and distrust of the Bolsheviks to the "warriors" (many of whom in fact, although honestly served the new regime, but did not sympathize with him). In the end, the "speciality" of the Chekists resulted in a grandiose staged performance called "operational development of "Spring". 

The development was started by the GPU (State Political Administration - political police of the USSR - Ed.) of the USSR in January 1930 and, apparently, it was then given the code name "Spring". The first of the cases implemented by the UGPU within the framework of this operational development was the case of the so-called "Headquarters of the Rebel Troops of the Left Bank" - a mythical fist organization in the villages of Chernigovshchina, allegedly preparing an anti-Soviet uprising.

Military figure, teacher and theorist Alexander Verkhovsky (1886-1938), posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

The original case was designed out of connection with the military environment. However, in the fall of 1930, the investigation began to develop a scenario linking peasants "conspirators" with former officers of the Tsarist army - teachers of Kiev military schools and commanders of parts of the Kiev garrison. In the winter, the arrests of military personnel, mainly former officers, began in Ukraine. By July 1931, according to incomplete data, at least 305 servicemen had been convicted in Ukraine in all cases brought under the "Spring" development. The testimony obtained during the investigation of cases established in Ukraine, the UGPU used in the preparation of other cases from this series - first of all, the so-called "general staff case." 

"The case of the General Staffers" (aka "the case of the teachers of the Military Academy of the RKKA im. Frunze") - the most famous of the cases of "military specialists" implemented by the UGPU in 1930-1931 - was based both on the testimony of the military, arrested in Ukraine, and on their own intelligence developments of the Moscow Chekists. In this case, such well-known military theorists as A.E. Snesarev, A.A. Svechina, A.I. Verkhovsky, S.G. Lukirsky, A.H. Bazarevsky, E.K. Smyslovsky, V.N. Gatovsky, F.F. Novitsky, a number of other teachers of Moscow military and civil universities - no less than 22 people were arrested. 

The biographies of those arrested are similar: all of them are former generals and colonels of the Tsarist army, graduates of the General Staff Academy, in 1918-1920 who entered or were called up to serve in the RKKA as "soldiers" and actually led the actions of the Red Army during the Civil War; in the 1920s - leading teachers of the Military Academy of the RKKA I. Frunze, the Academy of the Air Force.

Military teacher and theorist Alexander Andreevich Svechin (1878-1938), posthumously rehabilitated.

 They were accused of creating a "counter-revolutionary officer organization", which was allegedly headed by General A.A. Brusilov, and after his death in 1926 - A.E. Snesarev. In addition to the "confessions" of the majority of the accused, the investigation found two "proofs" of the existence of this organization: the participation of those arrested in 1924-1926. in the so-called "St. George evenings" (ie, annual meetings of St. George knights) and regular working "tea drinking" of the teachers of the Military Academy at A.I. Verkhovsky. On July 18, 1931, the Collegium of the OGPU sentenced Snesarev, Verkhovsky and Smyslovsky to death, commuted to 10 years in prison, three other defendants to 10 years, 11 people were sentenced to 5 years, one to 5 years of exile, one to three years probation, three are released.

 Cases against officers multiplied

 At the same time, other major cases were unfolded against the "military experts":

 - the case of the teachers of the Leningrad Military-Political Academy. Tolmacheva: at least 14 academy teachers were arrested and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment or exile for creating a "counter-revolutionary organization" associated with the Moscow "General Staff" support for former graduates of the Academy of the General Staff, who were left without a livelihood);

 - "Guards case" - the most massive of the cases opened in Leningrad in 1930-1931 to identify "counter-revolutionary conspiracies" among military experts. Former guards officers of the Preobrazhensky, Semenovsky, Moskovsky, Izmailovsky, Jaegersky, Grenadier, Pavlovsky, Caspian and some other regiments of the imperial army were accused of creating a "counter-revolutionary officer organization."

A number of episodes that served as "proof" of the existence of such an organization are associated with the traditional regimental holidays, where officers who once served in these regiments met, as well as the secret storage of banners and other regimental relics.

By February 7, 1931, at least 325 people had been arrested in this case, as well as in a similar "artillery case" - graduates and teachers of the former Petrograd artillery schools, Mikhailovsky and Konstantinovsky. Some of those arrested were sentenced to execution and executed in May 1931, while others were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment; some were released. 

- "the case of military personnel" - teachers of military affairs in civil universities and military schools in Moscow, Leningrad and a number of other cities (at least 50 arrested, two shot);

- The case of "officer conspiracy" among the military commanders of the Moscow Military District (the number of arrested and convicted has not been established).

The consequences of the Spring case also affected the RCCA Navy: about 300 people were repressed in the Navy in 1931, more than half of them former naval officers.

Repressions against the "former"

According to the calculations of the modern Ukrainian military historian J.Y. Tinchenko, "as a result of mass arrests of former officers in 1930-1931, at least 10,000 people were repressed. 

At the same time, all these cases, the UGPU made mass arrests of civilians from former officers, junkers and cadets; only in Moscow in 1930-1931 on this basis was arrested and convicted about a thousand people.

According to the calculations of the modern Ukrainian military historian J.Y. Tinchenko, "as a result of mass arrests of former officers in 1930-1931, at least 10,000 people were repressed." Unfortunately, the researcher does not specify what proportion of them were commanders who were on active duty in the RKKA, and what - those who had long been "on the citizen"; but it is obvious that the repressed commanders of the Red Army numbered in the thousands. It should be noted that in 1933-1934 many convicted "military officers" - of those who were not immediately shot - were released from serving their sentences (usually without reviewing cases) and returned to the army. However, during the Great Terror of 1936-1938 most of them were arrested and shot again. 

Stalin's Great Terror in the Armed Forces of the USSR

During the Great Terror, intense repression against the Red Army forces resumed. They were carried out on several lines at the same time. But only one of these lines - numerous cases of "military-fascist conspiracy in the RKKA" that unfolded in the wake of the trial of eight top military commanders on June 11, 1937 (the so-called "Tukhachevsky case") - can rightly be described as specifically "military".

The "Tukhachevsky case" seems to date back to all or almost all of the cases of the "military-fascist conspiracy". Therefore, it is worth dwell on it in more detail. Stalin and other leaders of the MAC (b) knew the history of the French and English revolutions, and the spectre of "red Bonaparte" or "Red Monk" did not allow them to sleep peacefully. It should be noted that they are not the only ones: in white emigration from time to time there were hopes that the military coup in the USSR, led by some ambitious warlord, will one day sweep away the Bolshevik regime and return them to their Russia.

Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky (1893-1937), rehabilitated posthumously in 1957.

 From time to time, fictional novels about “how it would be” (and in the post-war era - about “how it could be”) even appeared in émigré publishing houses. Stalin and Yezhov did not even have a special need to come up with a scenario for the "Tukhachevsky case": it had already been invented in Paris, Belgrade and other centers of Russian emigration. There is a popular legend about the so-called "red folder" fabricated by the Nazi special services and thrown to Stalin: allegedly this folder contained materials incriminating the Deputy People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky in the preparation of a military coup. This legend goes back to the memoirs of the former chief of German foreign intelligence W. Schellenberg. Schellenberg names a prominent figure in the Parisian White emigration, Major General Skoblin, as the primary source of information. Considering that Skoblin has been an agent of the OGPU since the early 1930s, it can be stated that the seeming chain through which information about the "Tukhachevsky conspiracy" was passed from hand to hand is in fact a vicious circle. One way or another, no traces of the "red folder" were found in the materials of the investigation in this case, or at the trial of eight commanders of the Red Army. The real underlying basis of the case was, apparently, the long-standing dislike of Stalin and Voroshilov for Tukhachevsky, going back to their friction during the Civil War and exacerbated by differences in views between the People's Commissar of Defense and his deputy on key issues of military development. However, repressions against major military leaders began almost a year before the "Tukhachevsky case" and, apparently, without regard to the personality of the marshal. On August 14, 1936, the deputy commander of the Leningrad Military District, Corps Commander V.M. Primakov and the former commander of the Primorsky group of forces of the OKDVA, and then the military attaché in Great Britain, corps commander V.K. Putna.

2nd-ranked commander August IvaanowicUs Cork (1887-1937), posthumously rehabilitated in 1957.

Apparently, their arrests should be considered not as the beginning of the "case of military-fascist conspiracy in the RKKA", but as the construction of a "military" branch of the case of the "anti-Soviet united Trotskyist-zinoviev center."

However, in the spring of 1937 the script was changed. 

On May 10, 1937, Tukhachevsky was suddenly removed from the post of deputy defense committee and transferred to command the troops of the Volga Military District. He was arrested on 22 May. Most of the other arrests in the leadership of the RCKA were carried out in the same way: first - removal from office and transfer to another military district, after a few days of arrest. On June 2, an extended meeting of the Military Council for The Narcotics Defense was held, at which the drug-defense narcotics of Voroshilov and Stalin himself made detailed reports on the disclosure of the "anti-Soviet Trotskyist military conspiracy" in the RKKA. In addition to Marshal Tukhachevsky, the kombors Primakov and Putna, the commanders of the 1st rank, I.P. Uborevich and I.E. Yakir, were named as participants in the plot; Chief of the Military Academy I. Frunze, Commander of the 2nd rank A.I. Cork; Comcor B.M. Feldman; Chairman of the Society for the Promotion of Defense, Aviation and Chemical Construction, R.P. Eideman. They were accused of participating in the "anti-Soviet Trotskyist military organization", planning the soviet war defeat in the future war, spying for Germany, preparing terrorist acts against members of the Politburo and intending to organize a military coup. On June 11, at a closed session of the Special Judicial Presence of the Supreme Court of the USSR, all eight military commanders were sentenced to execution and executed on the same day. 

Commander of the 1st rank, Hieronymus Petrovich Uborevich (1896-1937), was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957.

The chain reaction of the arrests, which began with the Tukhachevsky case, captured a significant part of the senior and senior command staff. Speaking about the repressions directed against the Red Army, we first of all refer not to the "mass operations of the NKVD" but to the complex of cases united by the common name of the "military-fascist conspiracy in the RKKA". 

These cases were key to undermining the combat capability of the Soviet Army, Navy and Air Force, for they were the ones who hit the top command with the greatest force; in addition, they had an obvious tendency to extend to the following parts of the team. According to the historian O.F. Souvenirov, in addition to those convicted on June 11, the charge of participation in the "military-fascist conspiracy" in 1937-1939 was charged: one marshal (A.I. Yegorov; another marshal, V.K. Blucher, died in prison as a result of torture three weeks after his arrest, but it is very likely that he, among others, would have been charged; Two 1st-ranked teams Six teams of the 2nd rank; 13 Komkoram; 47 commidis; 68 Combrigs; 78 colonels. A similar picture is taking place in the case of political workers, Navy personnel and the Air Force. 

Almost all of these commanders were sentenced to death and shot.

Repression on national and social grounds

Other lines of repression, affecting, among other categories of the population, and the RKKA soldiers, are various mass operations of the Great Terror, where the contingent of the repressed were selected not on the basis of professional, but on other criteria: "Polish," "Latvian," "German," "Finnish," "Estonian" etc. operations, operational order of the NKVD No.00447 on "anti-Soviet elements." 

The so-called "Yezhov report" contains, separately, the figure for the comsomen - 10,363 people, and separately for the Red Army and junior staff - 8,027 people. 

In the NKVD's reporting and statistical reports there are figures on which it is possible to estimate the total scale of repression in the Red Army in 1937-1938. the total amount of these "seizures" for 24 months, including the arrests of both the commander and ordinary Red Army, is 26,641. "A summary of the number of people arrested and convicted by the NKVD bodies of the USSR for the period from 1/X-36. 1/VII-1938," compiled in the 1st special department of the NKVD of the USSR in October 1938, shortly before the completion of the "mass operations" (the so-called "Yezhov report") contains, separately the figure for the composite - 10,363 people, and separately for the Red Army and junior committee - 8027 people. 

Marshal of the Soviet Union Clement Voroshilov (1881-1969).

Of course, these figures are notoriously incomplete. First, repressions in the RCKA, including in the top command, continued after July 1, 1938, and after November 17, 1938, when the mass operations of the NKVD were curtailed, and in 1939-1941, and even after the beginning of the war. (For example, on October 28, 1941, under the personal order of the drug lord of the interior, L.P. Beria, 15 major military commanders and military-engineering leaders arrested on the eve of the war or immediately after the beginning of the war were shot and evacuated from Moscow's investigative prisons; among them, almost the entire top of the Air Force Command were shot. Secondly, and most importantly, these figures do not take into account those who were dismissed for political reasons from the ranks of the Red Army and arrested as civilians.

In 1937-1938, the RKKA team experienced two large purges. The first began in the spring of 1937, just after the February-March plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b): the army was cleared of commanders accused of "links with Trotskyist-zinoviev conspirators." 

The second purge began after the issuance on June 24, 1938 by the defense narcotics of Voroshilov directive No.200/sh on the dismissal of "Germans, Latvians, Poles, Estonians, Lithuanians, Finns, Romanians, Koreans and other nationalities not belonging to the peoples of the USSR" to reserve or even from the ranks of the RKKA.

The directive applied to the RCKA staff, ranging from battalion commanders and to all civilians, and also applied to persons "born, living or having relatives" abroad. It was obviously about the possible contribution of the defense drug mafia to the "national operations" carried out by the NKVD.

The total result of these purges we find in the note of the head of the Office of the RKKA E.A. Jadenko in the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b): in 1937-1939, 28,685 commanders were dismissed from the ranks of the Red Army (without the Air Force and Navy) for political reasons. How many of them have already been arrested "on the citizen" is an open question; O.F. Souvenirov estimates that about a third.

Possible impact of repression in the army on the scale of losses in the war

The general public is often interested in the impact of repression on the combat capability of the Red Army and, in particular, the role of these repressions in the 1941 disaster. This questioning is dangerously bordering on speculative constructs in the field of "alternative history" and, strictly speaking, cannot be the subject of professional analysis. Let us, however, make one cautious judgment. 

The repressions created a huge number of vacancies in the top and middle command of the Red Army. 

The repressions created a huge number of vacancies in the top and middle command of the Red Army. These vacancies were forced to fill by accelerating the career advancement of the surviving commanders, who, regardless of their military abilities, had no and could not have the command experience corresponding to their new positions. Such commanders will not necessarily lose battles. But the battles they will lead are likely to cost their subordinates dearly. It was this circumstance, along with the cultivated attitude in Soviet society to people as consumables, led to the incredible losses of the Red Army in personnel during the war - both during defeats and in the years of victories. 

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Ganin A.V. General Staff Corps during the Civil War 1917-1922.

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Military history magazine. - 2013. - № 5. - S. 51-54.

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history. — 1997. — № 5. S. 109-121.

Svetlanin A.V. Far East Conspiracy. - Frankfurt-on-Main: Sowing, 1953.

Solonevich B.L. Conspiracy of Red Bonaparte: Marshal Tukhachevsky. Buenos Aires: The Sower, 1958.

Sorokin A.K., Grigoryev E.M. "Isn't it better to crush viper eggs in the person of General Slashchev..."

How was the fate of former tsarist officers who joined the RCKA. homeland. –

2017. - №9. P.112-119.

P.A. Special Operations Ship: Lubyanka and the Kremlin 1930-1950: Memories of The General

Lieutenant of the NKVD. "M.: Ed. OLMA Press, 1997.

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Public Science Foundation, 2000.

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"One protocol was all sentenced to be shot." Victims of the "Greek operation" of the NKVD

In March 1938, the so-called "Greek operation" which the NKVD had been conducting since December 1937 in the Krasnodar region and eastern Ukraine ended: thousands of Greeks, Soviet citizens and refugees from Turkey were shot or deported to Western Siberia on the personal orders of Yezhov. The materials of the investigation establish that the Greek intelligence is actively espionage-sabotage and rebel work in the USSR, performing tasks of British, German and Japanese intelligence. The basis for this work are the Greek colonies in the Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar regions of the North Caucasus, Donetsk, Odessa and other regions of Ukraine, in Abkhazia and other republics of the Caucasus, in Crimea, as well as widely scattered groups of Greeks in various cities and areas of the Union...

In order to suppress the activities of Greek intelligence in the USSR I order:

On December 15 this year, all Greeks suspected of espionage, sabotage, rebel and nationalist anti-Soviet work were arrested simultaneously in all republics, regions and regions. 

People's Commissioner of Internal Affairs of the USSR

State Commissioner-General

Security OF THE E.U.S.

Before approving the Plan, the Soviet government offered Greece to "take away" the Greeks that Stalin did not need. But Athens refused, fearing that people who had survived under Soviet rule and were infected with communist ideology could become the "fifth column" of the revolutionary movement. And the political situation in Greece was already unstable - in 1935, the country had a military coup, which restored the overthrow of the monarchy a decade earlier. It so happened that the Soviet Greeks turned out to be suspects decisively for all - in the historical homeland they were considered communists, in the USSR - agents of bourgeois intelligence. Shortly after the forced eviction to Siberia, many men of Greek nationality were victims of another special operation of the NKVD - they were accused of creating a "sabotage and spy network" in the Novosibirsk region and sentenced to death. One of the "spies" killed by the Chekists was a special migrant Mikhail Albaut, who, according to investigators, for several months of life in the completely unfamiliar Prokopievsk (which was then part of the Novosibirsk region) managed to become an active participant in the anti-Soviet underground.

Indictment in the case of "Greek spies" in Prokopievsk. 1938

"The investigation established that the spy-sabotage group included Greek fists: Panko G.K., Kolokotroni D.I., Medet A.G., Albaut M.S. and others. The investigation of the named group found that the participants were engaged in the collection of spy information on the instructions of the German intelligence. They carried out subversive and subversive work at the mines of the Prokopievsky mine... counter-revolutionary fascist agitation among the people around them. They organized counter-revolutionary gatherings where they discussed the struggle against the Soviet government."

From the indictment on February 10, 1938.

Svetlana Albaut, granddaughter of Mikhail Albaut, who was shot in 1938, was able to obtain from the archives of the FSB in the Kemerovo region the materials of her grandfather's criminal case and read the "confessions" that he gave during the interrogation, stipulating himself and his acquaintances, also accused under the "counter-revolutionary" article of the USSR. 

"The question is: Who and when attracted you to this counter-revolutionary group?

Answer: I was recruited into the counter-revolutionary espionage and sabotage group in 1936 by the Greek Panko... who told me that the Soviet government led by the Communists leads the country supposedly not to improvement, but to deterioration. The village was ruined, the peasants were forced to go to collective farms, and some were unearthed and sent to uninhabited areas. Communists supposedly only on paper promise to give good living conditions, but in fact there is no care for the people. We, the special settlers, do not consider for people. The working day is not normalized, supposedly always have to work very much, and the salary is very low. I declared, at least rather, the war of fascist countries began and would overthrow the soviet union. Panko answered to me that the war of fascist countries against the USSR is now very successful and, in all likelihood, this war will soon begin. The state of state will be overthrown at the time of the war, and we are interested in it and should help the fascist countries..."

From the interrogation report of M. Albaut

Svetlana tells about how shocked her acquaintance with the "evidence part" of the prosecution: a nine-meter room in a mining barracks, where the special migrant Albaut, his wife and daughter lived, was declared almost the headquarters of an underground, sabotage, spy organization. 

He said goodbye: "Don't think of me. Take care of the children." Grandma was pregnant. My father was born after my grandfather died. 

-I found a long list of participants of this "organization" who supposedly gathered at my grandfather's house for "secret meetings". Idea? Barack, a tiny room where there was not even a lock on the door, because all the special settlers were absolutely beggars. And that's where the whole mob of conspirators gathers. Crazy and absurd! But the investigator did not care about such minor inconsistencies. According to his grandmother, Mikhail Semenovich, when they came for him, was well aware that he would not return. He said goodbye: "Don't think of me. Take care of the children." Grandma was pregnant. My father was born after his grandfather's death...

- In your family it was customary to talk about repressed ancestors?

-The story of his father's difficult childhood as the son of the "enemy of the people" was not a family secret. On our mother's side, we were also repressed, but it was possible to kill my grandparents - they didn't say a word about it, because they were very afraid. My father, on the other hand, never hid anything. He told me and my sisters that after 6th grade he was kicked out of school for running around the desks. Other boys also ran, but only he was the son of the enemy of the people, and therefore he was expelled. He also told about how at the age of 18 he was drafted into the army and lived for a month with other conscripts in the barracks, and when everyone, so beautiful and solemn, stood in line for the oath of office, the commander called his name: "Albaut, step out of order" - and in disgrace expelled, because the son of the "enemy of the people" should not serve in the Soviet army. 

- It turns out that it was in 1956? 20th Congress, rehabilitation of victims of Stalin's repressions. Your father didn't?

One day, a father and six sons were arrested. By one protocol, all sons were sentenced to be shot and shot

 - I know for sure that he received a certificate of rehabilitation of his grandfather only in 1991. He was already over fifty, and all his life he felt like an outcast, although he graduated from Sibstrin (Novosibirsk Institute of Architecture and Civil Engineering. - SR) and stayed there to teach. In the seventies, he was even offered to join the party to pursue a career and become dean of the Faculty of Architecture. Dad then made an excuse that, they say, he was not ready, did not feel himself worthy of the high title of a member of the CPSU. In fact, he was very much offended by this power, which had oppressed him since childhood. At the same time, my father did not make any political statements, he simply refused to join the party. Well, it is clear that he was not given the position of dean. This is how his fate developed, with an eternal feeling of tragedy and uselessness. He grew up almost a street child, and the fact that he managed not to go to prison is simply amazing. Here I must say thank you to an elderly teacher from the school for working youth, where dad studied from 18 to 23 years old. She came to his house when he was skipping school, and since the doors did not close there, she neatly sat down on a chair and waited for him for several hours. When my father returned, the teacher told him: "Vitechka, you are so smart, you definitely need to study. Please come back and be sure to finish school. You will succeed." Dad said that he felt ashamed in front of this grandmother, a stranger who helps him put his brains in place and somehow arrange his fate, says Svetlana.

 In 1977, a certified architect, teacher Sibstrina Viktor Albaut with his wife and daughters went to the exhibition "Photo of the USA", held in Novosibirsk. American photographer Nathan Farb made a family portrait of the Albauts, which was then included in the album The Russians, published in the United States and Western Europe. According to the photographer, the Albauts seemed to him a happy Soviet family - three children, the youngest Tanya and Sveta are twins.

The Albaut family, 1977 (left). Nathan Farb, Svetlana and her daughters (right)

"Yes, I agree that this picture captures a happy moment in the life of our family," says Svetlana. - I am grateful to Nathan for the fact that he then made our portrait, I certainly do not remember this moment, but the older sister Larissa told how my father was worried before taking pictures. It is very sad that he is no longer alive and he did not meet Farb when he came to Novosibirsk again in 2018. By the way, around then I realized that my father was always dreaming. I felt his presence in my dreams as a sign that he needed my support. It's like I have to do something, but I don't know what. And last year, a woman, let's say, with unusual abilities, interpreted these dreams to me, explaining that my father asks me to restore the history of our family, as he himself never knew his father, and it is very important for him that the soul of Michael Albaut rested in peace.

After that, Svetlana started searching for the Greek church. She wanted to do a memorial service there for her grandfather. This opportunity presented itself in Cyprus, where friends advised to turn to the priest pater Nicola, the abbot of a small mountain temple.

Pater Nicola

- There is a completely different atmosphere, sunny and joyful, not as we are used to in Russia, where in every church strict old women and it is necessary to stand with a mournful expression. The Greeks always have life, some are sung, and immediately running laughing children, to whom no one makes comments. I agreed with the pater Nicola about the memorial service, he said that it is a great honor for him to remember the repressed compatriot, he knows about what happened in the USSR in the 30s. I was with my daughters, and we were all very excited about this moment. When the service was over, Pater Nicola came up to me and said, "I know how hard it was for you. But now your grandfather's soul is much better. I will remember him in my prayers all year." And then I felt some hope. My grandfather died without seeing his son, but his grandchildren are here and now continue his family. I understand that we live in a material world, and I do not have any esoteric leaps, but it is at such moments that you realize that material is not limited to what we live and feel. This is especially our connection with our ancestors, says Svetlana Albauta. 

The tragedy of the Greek people during the years of repression has been studied by the explorer Ivan Juha for many years. In January this year, he presented in Moscow the book "In Search of the Greeks" - another of the series "Greek martyrologist. History of repressions against the Greeks in the USSR in the 30-50s of the 20th century." 

Historian Ivan Juha

- My grandfather Ivan and his brother Andrei were shot in 1938, the third brother, Alexei, served 11 years on Kolyma and returned home. Even earlier, in 1930, their sister Sophia was unearthed and sent to Western Siberia, - the researcher says. - We have been tough in our family, although this is not an absolute record of the "Greek operation". This is the average for a Greek family in the USSR (in 1938). Now I am working on the book "Citizens of Greece in the Gulag" and found the family Tifos from Taganrog - there one day arrested a father and six sons. With one protocol, all the sons were sentenced to death and shot, and his father (he was 68 years old) was given ten years of camps. 

Juha found out that the repressions affected every house in his native village - Razdolny Starobeshevsky district of Donetsk region. During the month, 164 villagers, adult men, were arrested, of whom 158 were shot. 

"In all Greek villages between Donetsk and Mariupol, the same statistic is the same as in my native village," says Juha. - Then, when I came to study at the geographical faculty at Moscow State University and met my compatriots from other regions of the country, I learned that the same thing happened in their native places at the same time. The exact number of those repressed is still unknown. It was difficult to know the exact data because many archives were not available. In my opinion, we can talk about 14-15 thousand people repressed by the Greek operation NKVD 1937-38. 

All they lost overnight and found themselves in new places with little or no means of subsistence 

- And what figures on deportations of Greeks in the 40s seem to you the most real?

- In the first deportation (1942) 8.5 thousand Greeks were deported from Krasnodar region and Rostov region to Kazakhstan and Krasnoyarsk region. My books "Specials Go to the East" and "As It Was in Kuban" are dedicated to this. The second deportation of the Greeks (1944) was marked by the total eviction of Greeks from Crimea - more than 15,000 people. Among them were 3.5 thousand subjects of Greece, they were sent to Uzbekistan. Most of them were resettled in Kazakhstan, the Urals (in the Sverdlovsk and Molotov regions (now the Perm region) and Bashkiria) and in the Kemerovo region. The most mass deportation of Greeks happened in 1949, when 37.5 thousand people were deported from the Black Sea coast (from Batumi to Anapa), as well as from Odessa and Baku. Whole families were evicted from these beautiful places, even then the Greeks had two-storey houses, tangerine gardens and vineyards, tobacco plantations... They lost all of this overnight and found themselves in new places with little or no means of subsistence. Many other ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, where the wise national policy of the Soviet state was glorified: Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Armenians, Koreans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Karachayevs, Bulgarians... To sum up, there are about 62,000 deported Greeks. Plus about 20,000 people were shot and sent to camps in 37-38 years, that is, in total about 80,000 Greeks were repressed. In total, about 350,000 Greeks lived in the USSR.

- How many Greeks who suffered then were then rehabilitated, at least "posthumously"?

Enemy, unreliable declared a whole nation, so in addition to personal rehabilitation need to rehabilitate the entire ethnic group 

-As for 1937-38, all are rehabilitated personally. But if suddenly, working in the archives, I find that one of the repressed is not rehabilitated (and relatives of them are not left), then I as a citizen of the Russian Federation, who has the right to apply for rehabilitation, I submit it. To date, I have managed to rehabilitate 38 people. As for the deportees, almost all of them are also personally rehabilitated. But deportation is not a personal repression, it is a repression against the people, when no one was personally guilty. Enemy, unreliable declared a whole nation, so in addition to personal rehabilitation need to rehabilitate the entire ethnic group. This requires a presidential decree on the rehabilitation of the Greek people. Such regulations have been issued for several peoples, such as Koreans. I'd like to do that for the Greeks. I believe that one day such an order will appear. It is possible that the eight volumes published as part of the Greek Martyrologist project will help to achieve this, says Ivan Juha.

In 2005, businessman and then-MP Ivan Savvidi introduced a bill on the rehabilitation of Russian Greeks to the State Duma, in which he proposed to recognize that "the political rehabilitation of Russian Greeks means their right to free national development, as well as the right to restore the citizenship of the Russian Federation to Greeks who were illegally deported to other republics of the USSR." Savvidi also wrote about the same to the administration of the Russian President. From where he was told that "the eviction of the Greeks was carried out differently, not as "Russian Greeks" but as Greek nationals, former Greek nationals or Greek subjects, accepted into Russian citizenship. In addition, the eviction was carried out not so much from the territory of the RFSR, as from the territories of other republics of the former USSR, and in this regard, the issue of issuing a decree of the President of the Russian Federation on the rehabilitation of Russian Greeks is problematic." After this response, the bill on "rehabilitation of Russian Greeks" was withdrawn from consideration by the State Duma.

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